'Gillespie and I' by Jane Harris

“It would appear that I am to be the first to write a book on Gillespie.  Who, if not me, was dealt this hand?  Indeed, one might say, who is left to tell the tale?”

So begins Gillespie and I, the Orange Prize long-listed second novel by Jane Harris.  Set, by turns, in 1880s Glasgow and 1930s London, the story is narrated by the elderly Harriet Baxter.  Now almost in her 80s, Harriet has decided to record for posterity the story of her close, if short-lived, friendship with the talented Scottish artist, Ned Gillespie, and his family.

The narrator first encounters the Gillespies during the 1888 International Glasgow Exhibition, at a time when Ned‘s talents are slowly gaining recognition in the elitist Glaswegian art world.  Indeed, after years of struggling to make a name for himself, it seems he is finally on the cusp of a professional break-through. And yet, in just a few short years, the once-loving and close-knit Gillespie family has been torn apart, Ned has taken his own life and his artistic legacy destroyed.  What could have happened in the intervening years to cause such cataclysmic destruction?  It is this question that Harriet sets about answering in this tragic tale of parental love and neglect, wasted devotion and obsession.

From the outset, Harris skilfully conjures an unsettling and insidious sense of foreboding – like a cat toying with her prey, she deftly weaves a plot so complex and unnerving that the reader is left discombobulated, perplexed, unbalanced and disturbed.  Indeed, the only thing one is sure of is that nothing is as it seems in this rather brilliant novel.  Reading this book is akin to the slightly panicked feeling one has when stumbling through a hall of mirrors – in each disorienting image we catch glimpses of our actual reflection, but thanks to certain faults, distortions or biases in the glass, the truth remains tantalizingly out of reach …

Masterfully written, this is a novel that will stay with you long after you turn the last page.  Not to be missed!

'Gillespie and I' is published by Faber and Faber.

This year's Orange Prize short list will be announced on 17 April, and the winner will be unveiled 30 May.  For more information, see http://www.orangeprize.co.uk

Animal Farm & the Plague of Doodle Bugs

On this day (August 17th) in 1945, George Orwell's fifth novel, Animal Farm, was published.  As is often the case with great fiction, the book - which is now regarded as a classic of 20th century literature - initially struggled to find a publisher.  Indeed, the very fact that the book saw the light of day at all is a testament to the tenacious determination of its beleaguered author.

The book was written during the height of World War Two, while London was being pulverized by a steady stream of flying V1 bombs known as ‘doodle bugs'. In fact, the book itself very nearly fell victim to the deadly doodles - when, in June 1944, Orwell’s flat was, er, flattened, and the author was reduced to scrambling around in the debris in a bid to rescue his tattered manuscript.

George Orwell

And rescue it he did - but having narrowly escaped a quick death at the hands of a German bomb, the book looked set to suffer an agonizingly slow death at the hands of its potential publishers.

By this stage, Orwell's regular publisher, Victor Gollancz, had refused to take the book, fearful that its anti-Soviet themes would be unpopular at a time when the Russian alliance was proving crucial to the success of the British war effort.  TS Eliot, then editor at Faber & Faber, had similar objections.  An acceptance by Jonathan Cape was swiftly reneged upon after the publisher paid a visit to Peter Smollett, a shady official at the Ministry of Information. (Interestingly, Smollett was later discovered to be a Soviet agent.)

Thankfully, soon after the curtain had fallen on the Second World War - and not long before an entirely different curtain was erected on the edge of Eastern Europe - the book finally found its audience. Where once political tensions had hindered the book’s path to publication, the climate now proved to be much more favourable. In the lead up to what was to become the Cold War, the British Establishment were no longer concerned with suppressing criticism of the Soviets. Anti-Russian sentiment, it seemed, was now the order of the day. Publishers no longer baulked at the book’s themes, and in fact, rushed to snap up the manuscript. But it was too late for them.  Animal Farm had been accepted by Secker and Warburg … and, when published in the late summer of 1945, with the subtitle A Fairy Story, it was an instant success.

A full transcript of TS Eliot's rejection letter can be viewed here:
http://georgeorwellnovels.com/letters/t-s-eliot-rejects-animal-farm/